The beauty and the beast of celestial mechanics
The revolutionary idea of Newton was not finding out there is a force pulling the apple that fell on his head. It was all to obvious. What he found, and made the thinkers of his time so upset -the science was about to be born, it was called natural philosophy back then- was that the same set of rules govern the celestial bodies such as stars and planets -which were perfect and eternal,- and moral bodies such as an apple or humans. He was able to explain the astronomical laws that Kepler derived based on the painstaking observations by Tycho Brahe, with the laws he derived from everyday objects. The world and the skies were never to be seen as different spheres anymore. This year marks also the 400th anniversary of Galileo's observation of the stars and the planets, and the birth of modern astronomy. Following the path he opened, that is using publicly available observations, we are able to construct a fairly complete model of the history of our universe since -and before- its birth...